The Review

An unusual Jackie Chan movie, City Hunter is based on the Japanese comic character Ryu Saeba. City Hunter (Jackie Chan) is a private detective who is hired by a rich businessman and owner of a newspaper, to find his daughter, who has run away (because she disagreed with her father getting remarried). A series of strange incidents involving his assistant Kaori (Joey Wong) leads City Hunter onto a luxury ship, on which he finds the girl - but also trouble, because there is also a group of terrorists on board the ship. The terrorists, led by Col. MacDonald (Richard Norton) want to steal millions from the passengers, but they face opposition from not only Hunter, but also two female secret agents (Chingmy Yau and Amy Yip), a clever gambler (Leon Lai), and certain other characters.

This movie is my first introduction to the character of City Hunter. The movie itself is a very weird, wild comedy, which at times is just too strange to be funny! The cartoon-like filming of the movie is in itself reason to watch it, and there are some great fight scenes (especially the last fight between City Hunter and MacDonald). The presence of martial artists Richard Norton and Gary Daniels adds a lot to the movie, and I liked the colourful setting. There is also an atrociously bad music number called "Happy Happy Gala Gala" (or something like that) performed by a duo called DJ Soft and Hard in this movie, and one of the strangest scenes involves Jackie Chan and Gary Daniels transforming into various characters from Street Fighter II and fighting just like said videogame characters. I liked the music score (by Romeo Diaz and James Wong) a lot, and also the title song (by James Wong, sung by Jackie Chan).

Jackie Chan fans will like this movie anyway, but even for others it is worth seeing just for its sheer strangeness! Some of the humour though may not be appreciated by everyone.

Other Notes

One of the prints of this movie available here in India is severely shortened, it runs just about 75 minutes or so, and makes little sense because of the missing footage. I was fortunate to watch the full version on STAR Movies.

Filmed in Panavision.

More Details

Running Time: 100 minutes | Country: Hong Kong | Genre: Comedy/Action

Ratings Info

I rate all movies or game add-ons on a scale of 1 to 10 points. 1 is the lowest score, 6 is barely above average, 8 is good, and 10 is excellent (this score doesn't indicate something that is perfect in every way — it just means that I enjoyed it a lot). You'll find that I tend to give ratings of 8 and above often (that's only because I enjoy whatever I'm reviewing!). Reviews are updated as felt necessary. Of course, everything said in these reviews is my humble opinion only.